Thesis: This thesis explores different topics related to macroeconomic forecasting. It starts drawing from the literature on international finance some stylised facts on how the global economy became increasingly complex after the demise of the Bretton Woods system. This growing sophistication, in turn, generates a need for more forecasting research to buttress policy-making decisions. Chapter 3 shows that models for financial crises prediction (Early Warning Systems) fair relatively well in terms of forecasting performance. It discusses and compares the role of global and domestic indicators on the materialisation of an external crisis and delves into the difference between missed and predicted crises in terms of relative output losses. Chapter 4 evaluates the performance of short-term forecasts of economic activity produced by the main economic institutions and private sector. It studies how forecast errors correlate to different states of the business cycle, how forecasts produced by different institutions compare to each other and touches on questions related to the political dimension of forecast errors. Finally, Chapter 5 provides a novel dataset of IMF archival documents through a manually compiled dictionary and a term-frequency approach. It measures the depth of discussion about 20 different economic and non-economic crises for the whole Fund membership. It harnesses this rich data source to analyse how the complexity of macroeconomic forecasting has changed over the last decades.